As I posted a couple of days ago, it’s pretty easy to call a Senator’s office. I’ve only done it on a few occasions when I’m really motivated about an issue, and this week was one of those times. Not one to give advice I won’t take myself, I followed up my post about calling our senators by placing such calls on my own behalf. I received two very different responses.

When I called Senator Dorgan’s office, I was taken through the usual procedure: a friendly voice answered the phone, I briefly told them that I want to urge Senator Dorgan to vote No on any cloture or vote of passage for the Amnesty Bill, as I call it. They thanked me for my opinion, asked for my name and mailing address so I could receive a response letter from Senator Dorgan, and we thanked each other and hung up. This is exactly how it’s been before. Conrad’s office, however, was different.

First off, the phone rang forever. I know it was within office hours in Washington, DC but I wasn’t surprised at the long wait; the Capitol switchboard was actually shut down due to volume of calls Thursday and I expected things to be busy when I called Wednesday.

Second, the voice who answered the phone sounded one third agitated and two thirds cocky. I said the same thing, that “I’m calling to urge Senator Conrad to vote No for any cloture vote or final vote on the so-called Amnesty Bill.” I simply received an annoyed “okay” or something to that effect. Waiting for them to ask my name, it wasn’t happening. I kept the conversation going by asking, “don’t you want to record my name?” They said sure, so I gave them my name and said, “I’m one of the Senator’s constituents.” At that point they cut the call short. No asking my address or phone number to verify or anything. This was unusual and, in fact, different from any other call I’ve placed to any of our congressmen.

I have no doubt that my comments never reached Senator Conrad. Even if they had, I doubt they’d have changed his mind; he votes like a Massachussetts liberal consistently, and only keeps an apartment in North Dakota to qualify for re-election (along with his cohort, Senator Dorgan.

In this case, North Dakota was completely irrelevant in the immigration debate; our two Senators cancelled each other out. I expected Senator Dorgan to vote against this, and I give him credit for doing so, although his motivation lies with his love of Big Labor. (If we can have Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and Big Pharmaceuticals, we can also label the union lobby Big Labor.) Senator Conrad, however, is another story.

Like I said, Senator Conrad votes like a Kennedy. His votes consistently fly in the face of the values and demographics of the people he was elected to represent. But at least his staff could have been professional and recorded my message for the Senator, which I don’t believe they did. I’m going to continue calling, but more importantly I’ll be voting AGAINST him in the next election.

While exiting the federal building at the end of a long day, I was greeted by the waft of something smelling like incense, clinging to four or five lefties standing on the sidewalk. If you’ve ever gone into a “music store” you know the odor, something so strong and pungent that it’s sure to mask the smell of weed. Anyway, the band of women were breaking up and going their separate ways…one of them in this behemoth. All sides of the truck were adorned with the same sort of level-headed wisdom you see here.

Apparently this was a Code Pink member’s truck, judging by the pink shirts they wore and the pink spray paint. There were, however, stickers for all the usual leftist wackjob causes: abortion, impeachment, feminism, environmentalism, unions…the works. That is no surprise; organizations like these tend to champion each others’ causes in a lockstep leftist way. The tie that binds is liberalism itself, and everybody’s got their agenda. I didn’t see any pro-illegal immigration or “legalize weed” stickers, but I didn’t look that closely. Maybe they were on the other side of the truck.

What these groups have in common is that they each champion their own sin, basically. You have the envy that leads to class warfare, that encompasses the communists and the pro-union folks. There’s the drug legalization crowd of course, and the pro-abortion people. There are the rabid environmentalists which worship creation rather than Creation (Romans chapter 1), which is idolatry. The ones crying racism? Well, they’re just plain liars: they don’t want racism to ever go away, because the perception of racism is their empowerment. So they all band together into the ragtag bunch we call the modern Anti-American Left.

Code Pink, by the way, is an organization started by a Wiccan witch who calls herself “Starhawk”, communist activist Medea Benjamin (who was radical enough to even be forcibly removed from a DNC convention in 2004), environmental activist Jodie Evans (who also sits on the board of an environmental activist network that teaches people how to sit in trees etc.), and career protester Diane Wilson, who got herself thrown in jail for criminal trespassing and then used it as a springboard to claim human rights violations while incarcerated. It’s quite a bunch.

Groups like this one have quite a network going; founders and board members of one group are quite likely to hold rank in others as well. A site called Discover the Networks is helpful in trying to figure out just exactly who these people are, who’s paying their bills, and what they really stand for.

This brings me back to the Eyes Wide Open exhibit that was sponsored by the ND Peace Coalition. I still have my copy of the flyer they were handing out at the event. It’s got links to Code Pink and other groups including:

American Friends Service Committee: supported Vietnamese Communists, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, and the PLO

Gold Star Families for Peace: starring that buffoon, Cindy Sheehan, who loves Hugo Chavez, the dictator currently nationalizing assets and shutting down opposition media in Venezuela

I’d list more, but these people frankly aren’t worth your time or mine. Having spoken to Karen Van Fossan, the local contact for the ND Peace Coalition, I’m convinced she’s a really nice person…just as deluded as the day is long if she believes this stuff. I asked her about Code Pink’s ties to communists, and she appeared surprised and denied it. But even casual research at all into these groups finds otherwise, so I suspect either the ND Peace Coalition folks are completely oblivious…or they’re lying.

In any case, when you see those white “PEACE” banners that NDPC members put in their yards, just think of these radical groups and remember who’s behind those little white signs. It can be said that you can tell a lot about people by their friends. The friends of the North Dakota Peace Coalition are among the most radical anti-American, anti-capitalist groups you can imagine. Before lending them any credibility, check out the people they associate with and endorse in their own flyers.

This year’s state legislature is all over the place…trying to honor Bono (no, not Sonny) and patronizing the pathetic little ND Peace Coalition movement with their pacifist resolution, and now this. There’s a bill before the legislature, SB 2181, that would entitle a pregnant teen to consult a physician without their parent’s knowledge. Who sponsored this thing, the pro-abortion lobby?

There’s a reason that we don’t let kids do certain things before the age of 18, even 21 in some cases: they’re not always able to make sound decisions. So how are they magically supposed to come up with good judgement when a physician presents them with medical options, dealing with their body and that of their baby, in the absence of a parent? The only logical reasoning I can find in this bill is that it’s a step toward making abortions legal without a parent’s knowledge. The way most liberal policies take effect is a little at a time, in tiny harmless steps. This looks like an insidious way to work our way towards a pro-abortion bill for North Dakota. As of now abortion is excluded in this bill, but SB 2181 paves the way.

There’s only one abortion clinic in ND that I know of, in Fargo. Presumably if there was more demand, there would be more clinics. Either too few women are getting abortions to support additional clinics to provide the murder -er, service, or it’s just plain socially unacceptable here. How do liberals change that? The kids.

As soon as teens can handle unexpected or unwanted pregnancies without the knowledge of their parents, they’re more susceptible to the tempation to just “end” the pregnancy and go on as if nothing has ever happened. No facing the music with Mom and Dad, just a trip to the clinic and hope that nobody notices. Kids are brilliant at covering things up, and this bill wants to give them accomplices with medical degrees.

As for the title of this post: let’s apply this logic to the sale of alcohol and tobacco. We don’t allow kids to purchase these items because 1) they’re unlikely to have the judgement to decide whether or when to use them, and 2) these items have the potential for severe, even life-threatening consequences from their use. Well, if the legislature makes it legal for teens to seek medical advice without a guardian knowing, how is that different? We’re talking about the health of a teen and a baby as well. Nothing could have more dire, immediate consequences for a teen’s future than their medical well-being and sound decisions made for their care. That’s why they have parents, unless the state legislature passes this nonsense.

So, if this bill passes, let’s just go ahead and let them smoke and drink and everything else too. Follow the same logic. If that seems unreasonable to you, as it does to me, then urge your state legislators to vote against this ridiculous bill. The only one it serves in the end is the pro-abortion crowd, NOT the teens they claim it helps.

It goes to show how vacuous pop music is today when they can bring out Prince for the halftime show, performing twenty year old material, and it stands out above all the stupid eye-candy hip-hop buffoons that adorn the “music” scene these days.

Even if some of the eye candy can sing, they are still just pretty faces and half-naked bodies gyrating in front of a mechanical dance track. Prince is well known as a songwriter as well, including for some of the pretty pop faces. He can also play nearly every musical instrument you hear on his albums.

I work in video production. Quite a while ago one of my coworkers did a freelance job with Mtv News which involved a Kurt Loder interview at Prince’s place. He told me that Prince was the nicest, most humble and gracious guy he’d ever met. After the interview he told the crew they’d be welcome to return for a party he was holding later that evening. And this was before he developed a conscience and publicly declared that he was no longer going to perform much of the racy material that helped make him popular early in his career.

Even if the Christinas, Britneys, et al can sing…I don’t need my kids to see them gyrating around mostly nude like a bunch of hookers and earning grammys for hitting the high notes.

When people in the 50’s were told they needed to work hard or go to school, they were often warned that they’d end up “pumping gas for a living” if they didn’t make something of themselves. Along came fast food, and away went the full service gas station, and the threat evolved into “flipping burgers for a living.” In fact, working at fast food has become a metaphor for underachieving. I know there’s a huge flap right now about a certain Super Bowl commercial portraying a fast food worker, but the fact remains: there’s a negative connotation, deserved or not, associated with fast food employment. So be it.

I saw this at McRock ‘n’ Roll on Main Street this weekend. If the minimum wage issue is so dire, why are people starting out at McDonald’s at $6.50 to $8.00 an hour? I mean, that’s gotta be more than a lot of places are paying. The minimum wage is $5.15 or something like that, isn’t it? Apparently McDonald’s has a minimum wage of their own, and it’s due to their desire to staff their restaurant…not the legislature.

According to this article posted on KXMB’s website, a 2005 Labor Department survey reported four thousand North Dakotans working for minimum wage. This same census reported North Dakota’s population at 636,677. That means that .6% of North Dakotans drawing breath are working for minimum wage. But that’s not an honest statistic, that’s the kind that a newspaper, television station, or other major media outlet would use. But I’m not a journalism major, so let’s get some context:

Using KXMB’s figure of 4,000 people I did some investigating, perusing a report called North Dakota QuickFacts from the US Census Bureau to find out some interesting numbers for North Dakota:

21.4% of our state’s population is under 18 (136,249 people), and
14.7% of our state’s population is over 65 (93,592 people). So
63.9% of our state’s population is between 18 and 65 (406836 people).

Compare that to the .6% of North Dakotans (4000 people) who are making minimum wage! Let’s put it even further into context:

If only kids under 18 worked in ND, only 3% of them would make minimum wage (4000/136,249)!

If only senior citizens over 65 worked in ND, merely 4.3% of them would make minimum wage (4000/93,592)!

Since most kids under 18 don’t work, and the census data didn’t break down minors enough to extrapolate kids old enough to work, let’s eliminate them from the math for a second. Since many seniors retire at age 65 or earlier, let’s remove them from the equation too. If only the remaining 406,836 adults between 18 and 65 worked in North Dakota, only .98% — oh heck, let’s round it up to 1% — would make minimum wage!

Right now there is an enormous amount of pressure being applied by the class envy folks to bring up the minimum wage, even within our state legislature, when statistically NOBODY is making it! If there’s a vault somewhere with the specific data, I’d love to see it. Somehow I don’t think it’s families of four, as the talking heads pushing this thing want to tell you. As Tracie Bettenhausen indicates how hard it would be to eke out a meager existence, even survive, on minimum wage, she’s also completely ignoring the fact that a mere percentile of the jobs out there are paying it.

I dare say, that with only 4,000 minimum wage jobs existing in North Dakota, a person would be hard pressed to find one unless deliberately seeking it. If a guy with the notorious “family of four” were to apply for such a job, I’m willing to bet any responsible North Dakota employer would urge them to instead seek a job paying more money (or even offer them more)! I’ve had some low paying jobs in the Bismarck-Mandan area during my teens, but even bagging groceries, keeping score at the bowling alley, or maintaining baseball diamonds paid more than minimum wage. With McDonald’s paying over a dollar more than the minimum, I’m not even sure where I’d go to find $5.15 an hour!

As for the KXMB article…I’d expect better reporting, but I worked in television and around journalists for fifteen years. The people writing these articles are typically no more qualified than you the viewer, and in many cases know even less about a particular subject than many of the people they claim to inform. They may be simply repeating a press release or be woefully ignorant or misguided about their subject matter. Then there’s the fact that many of them are driven by an agenda. If you trust a journalist as your sole source of information, you deserve to be misled. In this information age, the facts are out there for your perusal. You need only look to find them and make your own conclusions. You may be mistaken from time to time, but at least you’re thinking for yourself.

I could turn this into a book with observations about the kids driving $30,000 cars to Century High School every day, or the politicians fighting immigration enforcement so illegal aliens can make far BELOW the minimum wage, but I’ll save that for a later date. I think I’ve made my point that the minimum wage debate in North Dakota is nothing more than an example of class envy and political posturing, served to you on a plate of misinformation.